Immigrant deportations as a humanitarian crisis

The number of illegal immigrants seeking asylum status across the Canadian border north of Plattsburgh will this month likely exceed 4,000, including Haitians whose temporary asylum here following hurricane devastation and epidemic in Haiti is now ending.

As a result, Canadian authorities are currently rushing to find and erect temporary housing for fleeing immigrants.

The humanitarian consequences for illegal immigrants and their families facing deportation are deeply disrupting and troubling.

Immigrant children born in the United States are citizens of this country (“birthers”) and may therefore be separated from their families and sent to orphanages in the U.S. as their parents are forced back across the border.

At the same time, industries that have employed undocumented aliens at minimal wages without benefits or adequate health care are already experiencing a lack of workers as immigrants — typically hard-working and law-abiding — are arrested and deported. (Locally, substantial numbers of illegal immigrants work on farms in Vermont and slate factories on the Vermont/New York border further south near Granville.)

Churches, service agencies, concerned individuals and legal organizations are working to address these issues, including St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Fort Edward; an organization of immigration lawyers (Capital Region Immigration Collaborative) in Albany; the Volunteer Lawyers Project in Buffalo, and individual citizens willing to shelter immigrants in their homes along their journeys out of the country.

In addition, our local Champlain Valley Friends of Refugees in April hosted a rally at the Underground Railroad Museum in Keeseville to highlight the inhumanity of Trump exclusionary policies and ICE-enforced deportations — now increased nationwide by 40 percent — for even traffic and other minor offenses.

Most recently, the protected DACA status of over 800,000 young illegal immigrants (the Dreamers) has been suspended by President Trump pending an action by Congress in the next six months to preserve the program.

And while numerous colleges have voiced support for their DACA students and refused to aid in their identification and deportation, ICE searches and seizures have left even these legal immigrants in jeopardy of sacrificing their educations and jobs.

Our volunteer Friends of Refugees organization (website at adirondack-friends-of-refugees.com), which since January 2016, has focused mostly on activities and services for vetted refugees settled in the Burlington, Vermont area, is now moving forward to also address the urgency of immigrant deportation issues generally and locally at the Canadian border just north of Plattsburgh.

We are confident that many local residents have felt moved to address these issues while others can connect with efforts already in place in the region and with the resources and interactive conversation available on this website.

Meanwhile, others who oppose this perspective and these efforts will instead argue that illegal immigrants are in fact “getting what they deserve” in choosing unauthorized entry into the country to take jobs away from native workers. (Jamaican workers picking apples locally enter the country lawfully and seasonally through a government-administered foreign worker program.)

There are, indeed, determined, logical, and heartfelt arguments on both sides of this issue, though the crime rate among illegal Mexican immigrants — whom President Trump has characterized as “rapists” and “bad hombres” — has consistently remained lower than that of native citizens.

Nevertheless, an act of illegal immigration is still a crime in this narrowed battlefield of contending perspectives, and perhaps this bitter debate will continue undiminished as long as comprehensive, fair-minded reform of immigration laws remains on the Congressional back burner.

In the meantime, the poorest and most desperate of our immigrant neighbors and their children will continue to pay a nearly unbearable cost of living in their working and family lives among us.

— Bob Harsh is a guest contributor and his views do not reflect the opinion of the Sun Community News Editorial Board.